Financial penalties on Greece because of the Waste Directive

The European Court of Justice on Tuesday (02/12/2014) ordered Greece to pay financial penalties for failing to comply with a 2005 judgment of the Court establishing its failure to fulfill obligations under the "Waste Directive."

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More particularly, in addition to a lump sum of 10 million euros, the Court ordered Greece, until the 2005 judgment is complied with in full, to make a penalty payment, the actual amount of which will depend of the progress made by Greece, but which, if there is no such progress, will be more than 14 million euros for each six-month period of delay.

Under the "Waste Directive", member-states must ensure that waste is recovered or disposed of without endangering human life and without harming the environment; they are also required to prohibit the abandonment, dumping or uncontrolled disposal of waste. Every holder of waste must have it handled by an undertaking which undertakes its recovery or disposal in accordance with the directive. Each such undertaking must obtain a permit from the competent authority.

In a first judgment delivered in 2005, the Court declared that Greece had infringed the directive on the ground that by February 2004 1,125 uncontrolled waste disposal sites remained in operation on the Greek territory and the closure of all illegal and uncontrolled landfills was not scheduled to take place until some time in 2008.

Compliance with the 2005 judgment presupposes: closure of illegal landfills, their actual cleaning up (not merely the planning of their cleaning up) and the creation of the necessary facilities for ensuring permanent compliance with the directive and the prevention of creation of new illegal landfills.

The Court finds it appropriate to fix the penalty payment on a six-monthly basis in order to enable the Commission to assess the state of progress of the measures for compliance with the 2005 judgment.

Accordingly, in respect of the first six-month period following delivery of today's judgment, the penalty payment will be calculated on the basis of an initial amount of 14,520,000 euros, from which the sum of 40,000 euros is to be deducted for each landfill closed down or cleaned up and 80,000 euros is to be deducted for each landfill both closed down and cleaned up.

The penalty payment due in respect of every six-month period thereafter is to be calculated on the basis of the amount of the penalty payment set for the preceding six-month period, from which the same deductions are to be made in respect of the closing down and/or cleaning up of sites during the six-month period in question.